Venezuelan · Drink
Chicha Andina
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, a floral thread lifting the aroma, on a rich, rounded finish.
Ingredients
- 200 g long grain white rice
- 1.5 litres water
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 600 ml whole milk, plus more to loosen
- 200 g sweetened condensed milk, plus more to serve
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- a pinch of salt
- ground cinnamon, to serve
Equipment
Blender
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Simmer the rice with the water and cinnamon stick, stirring now and then, well past done, until the grains have burst and the liquid is cloudy and thick, about 35 minutes. 35 min
- Lift out the cinnamon stick and let the rice cool to room temperature before it goes near the blender; hot starch reads thinner than it is and you will overshoot the milk.
- Blend with the milk, condensed milk, vanilla and salt until completely smooth, then pass it through a sieve, pressing hard, to leave the grit behind.
- Chill at least 4 hours, over which it thickens noticeably, then let it down with cold milk to the consistency of pouring cream. 240 min
- Serve over ice with a spiral of condensed milk and a heavy dusting of ground cinnamon.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- It is the pour
- Also Right
- Serve alongside something salty and fried
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise
This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.